Social Enactivism

Social Enactivism PDF

Author: Mark-Oliver Casper

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-11-19

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 3110577135

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Social enactivism is a philosophical theory which, through the analysis of discursive practice, aims at explaining how high-level cognitive conditions and processes emerge. The fundamental tenets of this theory are based on enactivist and (neo)pragmatist principles. Therefore, the emphasis is not on the purely linguistic understanding of discourse but on its structural interaction with technology, that is created by man himself, in the context of which the discursive performance takes place. This perspective addresses not only a blind spot in the international debate about "situated cognition" but also a current problem in the philosophy of mind.

Evolving Enactivism

Evolving Enactivism PDF

Author: Daniel D. Hutto

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2024-04-09

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 0262551772

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An extended argument that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. Evolving Enactivism argues that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. Building on their earlier book Radicalizing Enactivism, which proposes that there can be forms of cognition without content, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin demonstrate the unique explanatory advantages of recognizing that only some forms of cognition have content while others—the most elementary ones—do not. They offer an account of the mind in duplex terms, proposing a complex vision of mentality in which these basic contentless forms of cognition interact with content-involving ones. Hutto and Myin argue that the most basic forms of cognition do not, contrary to a currently popular account of cognition, involve picking up and processing information that is then used, reused, stored, and represented in the brain. Rather, basic cognition is contentless—fundamentally interactive, dynamic, and relational. In advancing the case for a radically enactive account of cognition, Hutto and Myin propose crucial adjustments to our concept of cognition and offer theoretical support for their revolutionary rethinking, emphasizing its capacity to explain basic minds in naturalistic terms. They demonstrate the explanatory power of the duplex vision of cognition, showing how it offers powerful means for understanding quintessential cognitive phenomena without introducing scientifically intractable mysteries into the mix.

Radical Enactivism

Radical Enactivism PDF

Author: Richard Menary

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9027241511

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"This collection is a much-needed remedy to the confusion about which varieties of enactivism are robust yet viable rejections of traditional representationalism approaches to cognitivism – and which are not. Hutto's paper is the pivot around which the expert commentators, enactivists and non-enactivists alike, sketch out the implications of enactivism for a wide variety of issues: perception, emotion, the theory of content, cognition, development, social interaction, and more. The inclusion of thoughtful replies from Hutto gives the volume a further degree of depth and integration often lacking in collections of essays. Anyone interested in assessing the current cutting-edge developments in the embodied and situated sciences of the mind will want to read this book."Ron Chrisley, University of Sussex, UK

Enactivist Interventions

Enactivist Interventions PDF

Author: Shaun Gallagher

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0198794320

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Enactivist Interventions is an interdisciplinary work that explores how theories of embodied cognition illuminate many aspects of the mind, including intentionality, representation, the affect, perception, action and free will, higher-order cognition, and intersubjectivity. Gallagher arguesfor a rethinking of the concept of mind, drawing on pragmatism, phenomenology and cognitive science. Enactivism is presented as a philosophy of nature that has significant methodological and theoretical implications for the scientific investigation of the mind. Gallagher argues that, like the basicphenomena of perception and action, sophisticated cognitive phenomena like reflection, imagining, and mathematical reasoning are best explained in terms of an affordance-based skilled coping. He offers an account of the continuity that runs between basic action, affectivity, and a rationality thatin every case remains embodied.Gallagher's analysis also addresses recent predictive models of brain function and outlines an alternative, enactivist interpretation that emphasizes the close coupling of brain, body and environment rather than a strong boundary that isolates the brain in its internal processes. The extensiverelational dynamics that integrates the brain with the extra-neural body opens into an environment that is physical, social and cultural and that recycles back into the enactive process. Cognitive processes are in-the-world rather than in-the-head; they are situated in affordance spaces definedacross evolutionary, developmental and individual histories, and are constrained by affective processes and normative dimensions of social and cultural practices.

Autonomy, Enactivism, and Mental Disorder

Autonomy, Enactivism, and Mental Disorder PDF

Author: Michelle Maiese

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-06-30

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1000609626

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This book brings together insights from the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind and existing work on autonomous agency from both philosophy of action and feminist philosophy. It then utilizes this proposed account of autonomous agency to make sense of the impairments in agency that commonly occur in cases of dissociative identity disorder, mood disorders, and psychopathy. While much of the existing philosophical work on autonomy focuses on threats that come from outside the agent, this book addresses how inner conflict, instability of character, or motivational issues can disrupt agency. In the first half of the book, the author conceptualizes what it means to be self-governing and to exercise autonomous agency. In the second half, she investigates the extent to which agents with various forms of mental disorder are capable of exercising autonomy. In her view, many forms of mental disorder involve disruptions to self-governance, so that agents lack sufficient control over their intentional behavior or are unable to formulate and execute coherent action plans. However, this does not mean that they are utterly incapable of autonomous agency; rather, their ability to exercise this capacity is compromised in important respects. Understanding these agential impairments can help to deepen our understanding of what it means to exercise autonomy, and also devise more effective treatments that restore subjects’ agency. Autonomy, Enactivism, and Mental Disorder will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophy of psychiatry, and feminist philosophy.

The Social Impulse

The Social Impulse PDF

Author: Jaime A. Pineda, Ph.D.

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-07-22

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 303108439X

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This book is an exploration of the integration-differentiation dynamics that result in a drive, or impulse, toward human sociality, arguing that our need to connect with other people is as fundamental as our need for food and shelter. In The Social Impulse: The Evolution and Neuroscience of What Brings Us Together, Jaime Pineda presents the evidence that social cohesion is a complementary force to natural selection, the Darwinian drive for differentiation and diversity. The book addresses the distinctive aspects of social behavior that arise from integration principles and seeks to answer the following questions: (1) Why does social cohesion arise? (2) What is the history of social dynamics? (3) How does social cohesion work? (4) When do the developmental aspects of social dynamics arise? A final section of the book addresses the value of sociality and social cohesion. By exploring the differences, similarities, and, most important, the interactivity between natural selection and social cohesion, this unique book provides a wealth of interesting, challenging, and unexpected insights.

Enactive Psychiatry

Enactive Psychiatry PDF

Author: Sanneke de Haan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-03-05

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1108426069

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Offers an integrative account of the relation between experiences, physiology and environment in psychiatric disorders.

Radicalizing Enactivism

Radicalizing Enactivism PDF

Author: Daniel D. Hutto

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0262018543

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A book that promotes the thesis that basic forms of mentality--intentionally directed cognition and perceptual experience--are best understood as embodied yet contentless. Most of what humans do and experience is best understood in terms of dynamically unfolding interactions with the environment. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists now acknowledge the critical importance of situated, environment-involving embodied engagements as a means of understanding basic minds--including basic forms of human mentality. Yet many of these same theorists hold fast to the view that basic minds are necessarily or essentially contentful--that they represent conditions the world might be in. In this book, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin promote the cause of a radically enactive, embodied approach to cognition that holds that some kinds of minds--basic minds--are neither best explained by processes involving the manipulation of contents nor inherently contentful. Hutto and Myin oppose the widely endorsed thesis that cognition always and everywhere involves content. They defend the counter-thesis that there can be intentionality and phenomenal experience without content, and demonstrate the advantages of their approach for thinking about scaffolded minds and consciousness.

The Mind-Body Politic

The Mind-Body Politic PDF

Author: Michelle Maiese

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-06-28

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 3030195465

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Building on contemporary research in embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind, this book explores how social institutions in contemporary neoliberal nation-states systematically affect our thoughts, feelings, and agency. Human beings are, necessarily, social animals who create and belong to social institutions. But social institutions take on a life of their own, and literally shape the minds of all those who belong to them, for better or worse, usually without their being self-consciously aware of it. Indeed, in contemporary neoliberal societies, it is generally for the worse. In The Mind-Body Politic, Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna work out a new critique of contemporary social institutions by deploying the special standpoint of the philosophy of mind—in particular, the special standpoint of the philosophy of what they call essentially embodied minds—and make a set of concrete, positive proposals for radically changing both these social institutions and also our essentially embodied lives for the better.

The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology

The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology PDF

Author: Jaan Valsiner

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-12-15

Total Pages: 1136

ISBN-13: 0199366225

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The goal of cultural psychology is to explain the ways in which human cultural constructions -- for example, rituals, stereotypes, and meanings -- organize and direct human acting, feeling, and thinking in different social contexts. A rapidly growing, international field of scholarship, cultural psychology is ready for an interdisciplinary, primary resource. Linking psychology, anthropology, sociology, archaeology, and history, The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology is the quintessential volume that unites the variable perspectives from these disciplines. Comprised of over fifty contributed chapters, this book provides a necessary, comprehensive overview of contemporary cultural psychology. Bridging psychological, sociological, and anthropological perspectives, one will find in this handbook: - A concise history of psychology that includes valuable resources for innovation in psychology in general and cultural psychology in particular - Interdisciplinary chapters including insights into cultural anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, culture and conceptions of the self, and semiotics and cultural connections - Close, conceptual links with contemporary biological sciences, especially developmental biology, and with other social sciences - A section detailing potential methodological innovations for cultural psychology By comparing cultures and the (often differing) human psychological functions occuring within them, The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology is the ideal resource for making sense of complex and varied human phenomena.